Published in:
01-04-2019 | Commentary
The Inclusion of Spillover Effects in Economic Evaluations: Not an Optional Extra
Author:
Werner B. F. Brouwer
Published in:
PharmacoEconomics
|
Issue 4/2019
Login to get access
Excerpt
Increasingly, welfare economic evaluations are used in the context of the allocation of scarce healthcare resources. Many jurisdictions prescribe their use in the context of reimbursement, funding, and/or pricing of new health technologies, especially pharmaceuticals. The fact that the outcomes of such evaluations can influence actual allocation decisions in healthcare underlines the importance of a sound methodology and an appropriate decision-making process. Fortunately, in both areas progress has been made over the past decades. However, there remains room for further improvement, for instance in finding appropriate estimates of monetary values of health, developing broader outcome measures than quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), finding appropriate equity (principles to estimate) weights for health outcomes, and estimating health opportunity costs. …